Subject: RFD: fast-import is picky with author names (and maybe it should - but how much so?)

From: Michael J Gruber <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:43:24 +0100

It seems that our fast-import is super picky with regards to author
names. I've encountered author names like

Foo Bar<[email-masked]>
Foo Bar <[email-masked]
[email-masked]

in the self-hosting repo of some other dvcs, and the question is how to
translate them faithfully into a git author name. In general, we try to do

fullotherdvcsname <none@none>

if the other system's entry does not parse as a git author name, but
fast-import does not accept either of

Foo Bar<[email-masked]> <none@none>
"Foo Bar<[email-masked]>" <none@none>

because of the way it parses for <>. While the above could be easily
turned into

Foo Bar <[email-masked]>

it would not be a faithful representation of the original commit in the
other dvcs.

So the question is:

- How should we represent botched author entries faithfully?

As a cororollary, fast-import may need to change or not.

Michael

P.S.: Yes, dvcs=hg, and the "earlier" remote-hg helper chokes on these.
garbage in crash out :(